Proper Names as Demonstratives in Fiction

In this article, I argue for two theses. The first is that, among different existing accounts of proper name semantics, indexicalism—a stance that treats proper names as indexical expressions—is best suited to explaining various phenomena exhibited by the use of proper names in fictional discourse. I will discuss these phenomena and compare the solutions offered by traditional descriptivist and causal-historical theories of proper name reference with those proposed by indexicalists. Subsequently, I will offer a novel account of indexicalism about proper names, which uses the apparatus of so-called hybrid expressions (Ciecierski, 2020; Künne, 1992; Predelli, 2006) as an alternative to traditional Kaplanian semantics for demonstratives. I offer an argument explaining why, among the variety of indexical views, one should favour such a hybrid theory over other available ones (e.g., Pelczar, Rainsbury, 1998; Rami, 2014) based on the analysis of “distributed utterances” (McCullagh, 2020) and statements that employ more than one fictional context.